We are a network of federated alt-tech sites
Because search engines might not always be our friends and we want our services to be discovered.
We would also like to be able to use the traffic that we have to leverage more unique eyeballs to our sites.
We would also like users to be able to discover the services they like best, lest they compromize and use non alt-tech.
We would like to reward websites that are kind to the rest of the community thus reducing antagonistic relationships between alt-tech websites.
Using our services involves linking to other sites in the federation, using any format you would like.
To make sure everyone gets a fair shake a service decides what will be linked to.
But really you get a lot of control over what you link to. But if people have some flexibility the service can stear the correct amount of traffic to each site so everyone is rewarded.
By omiting a link here or adding a link there every one can get what they give. But of all the possible solutions that could balance traffic the service will pick the one that most respects people’s preferences the most.
In terms of what would be required of site owners we want to create a few options for integration to make it easy. More options will be coming out.
For now you sign up here and you are in the system.
Next you need to ping the server from your backend to get a list of what to link to. This will come in a json format.
You can put those links anywhere on your site and style them in any way. The logo and description you get back in the json are only suggestions. You can put things in the footer or the side bar or provide your own descriptions. We do not want to take over how you format your site or how you link to other people.
The link you get for that domain will track that you sent someone to their site. These statistics will help us know how much traffic we need to give back to you. So it’s up to you to decide how prominent to make the links.
But something to consider is that someone who clicks out will likely come back to your site. But every person who leaves is another eyeball coming to your site. The person coming has more value that the person leaving because the person leaving is only leaving for a moment. He will be back. But the person who visits may stay forever. You are welcome to come to your own conclusions about how prominent you want to make links.
There are two ways to get the links for your domain.
You can either signin in at /signin and use the cookies to get your current links at /getlinks/[count]. But that requires backend requests with persistent cookies.
Or you can use /sec/getlinks/{secretkey}/[count] to get them. You can find your secret key in the panel.
The links for your site expire 15 minutes after you get your current set. Calling getlinks after 14 minutes will produce new links so you have a grace period. Caching for either 50 seconds or 14.5 minutes will ensure you always have fresh links. We are caching too so don’t worry about making frequent calls.
Old links will still work as links but they won’t count toward your stats
Or you could try jsonp.
/jsonp/getlinks/{url} OR /jsonp/sec/getlinks/{secretkey}/{url}
You can set preferences for what sites you link to. You will see that option in /panel. The preferences are strong. If you set most sites to 1.0 and others to 2.0 you will almost certainly spend near 100% of the time linking to those sites. Preference rating can range from 0.5 to 2.0.
To generate community cohesion you not only have the ability to give 10% of your score to another site it’s actually required. This helps small sites who are deserving to get initial traffic when they have none to give and it promotes sites being kind to one another because everyone would like to be picked more often. This concept is often also called charity. You have to pick one other site to give charity to, and you might be the recipent of it.
Originaly the goal was to maintain a 1:1 inbound and outbound ratio. A couple factors will make it deviate slightly.
First isthe charity concept. There will be at most a 10% negative discrepency but the positive discrepency doesn’t have bounds because a site much larget could be charitable to a much smaller site.
The other is an effect of preferences. If a particularly large site gives you a large preference there is a chance of having a 2:1 ratio in the direction of recieving extra traffic. This is unlikely though. You would have to be exclusively liked by someone special for that to happen. If they alone can’t maintain your good fortune, you will target 1:1 very quickly. There is a chance of having a 1:2 ratio but pretty much everyone will have to dislike you at the same time for that to happen, which is unlikely because many won’t adjust their preferences at all. The other case where someone could have a 1:2 ratio is if a very large site joined and the other sites couldn’t possibly generate the outbound traffic. The site would at minimum be linked from everywhere else though.
This service comes with no guarentees. The content of this document only describes the intentions of the project. Outcomes may vary. The owner of this site will not be held liable to any party.
Example:
Example code can be found here